Georgette Heyer (5 page)

The nurses knew that there would be no hope of wresting their charges away from Master Chaucer without a brawl, so although they knew the poet to be a mere scrivener, and (if report did not lie) at one time guilty of a scandalous fetching, they raised no objections to his taking care of the lordings for an hour. The lordings dragged him off to see all the wonders of the Great Hall; and here Bel sire, who had himself come to cast an eye over the stonemasons’ work, found them. ‘Ah!’ said Bel sire. ‘So you have met a friend, have you? Well, Master Chaucer? Do you see something of my lady in this knave?’

He dropped his hand on to Harry’s head, and Master Chaucer, pulling off his hood, said: ‘Verily, monseigneur.’ He added, in a soft voice: ‘ “So steadfast countenance, So noble port and maintenance!” ’

‘Well, well, we shall see!’ Bel sire said. ‘What was it that you wrote? “Ruddy, fresh, and lively hued,” eh?’

The lordings resigned themselves. Bel sire was going to recite the lines which described Grandmother’s golden hair. He would falter for a word, and call upon Master Chaucer to take up the tale; and after that they would be lucky if they escaped hearing the whole of the poem.

9

M. de Guyenne supped in the Great Chamber, with only his kinsfolk and the more important members of his household to bear him company. When the roasted apples were set upon the table, the blanch-powder, and the cheese, the ladies withdrew. Bess, who had exchanged waitings of eyes with Rutland throughout the meal, grew weary of him, and went away to her bedchamber, regretting the whim that had prompted her to accompany her father on this journey.

Dame Katherine was left with her hostess in the bower, eating dragés from a silver bowl. She was able to give the Countess good rede on the cure of infantile complaints, for before he had raised her to be his mistress she had had the care of the Duke’s daughters by his first marriage; but in-wit told her that it was not of her children that the Countess wanted to talk; and she was not surprised when Mary of Derby dismissed the ladies who attended on them. She said: ‘Well, and now we can be cosy! Out of dread, madam, you will be blithe to have your lord home again!’

‘Yes,’ Mary said. She paused, and then said, almost inaudibly: ‘Oh, yes! If I were not so much afraid!’

This did surprise Dame Katherine, for although my lord of Derby’s wooing had been hasty, she had always supposed Mary to have tumbled headlong into love with him. ‘Afraid?’ she repeated.

‘Of the King!’ said Mary, staring at her.

‘Oh, come, come!’ said Dame Katherine. ‘The King is well disposed towards your lord!’

‘No,’ said Mary. ‘He does not love my lord.’

‘Well,’ said Dame Katherine, ‘I daresay he is jealous of him, for they are exactly of an age, and your lord has won so much worship that it is no wonder the King should have envy at his heart.’

‘The King will never forgive my lord for Radcot Bridge,’ said Mary.

‘Oh, now, what a foolish gaingiving! They say the King has never spoken Oxford’s name since the day he broke in on him, crying that he had been betrayed, and his army scattered. Oh, dear, what a miserable creature Oxford was found to be, wasn’t he? No, no, I warrant you the King never spares him a thought!’

‘But my lord jointed the Lords Appellant, and the King doesn’t forget that. My lords of Arundel, and Gloucester, and Warwick stand out of his grace, and sometimes, madam, I cannot help but wonder – and fear!’

‘Oh, I am sure you are wrong! I should not say it, but you may take it for truth that no one was ever yet able to ’scape quarrelling with Gloucester! Handsome is as handsome does – people used to say he was the fairest of all the old King’s sons: well, those golden curls
do
take the eye, don’t they? – but whenever I hear of the borel-folk raising a cheer for him as he rides past, I can’t forbear thinking to myself, Yes, it’s very well to smile, and look so debonairly, but if ever there was a man with a sturdier temper may I never meet him! No, no, you can’t wonder at the King’s setting him from his grace! And as for Arundel, it’s time someone took order to him, or he will grow so large there won’t be room for another in the realm. Content you, the King looks on your lord with quite another eye. He and Nottingham were never in so deep!’

‘Madam, I wish he had not joined Thomas Mowbray of Nottingham! I don’t trust the Mowbrays!’

That gave Dame Katherine a moment’s pause. ‘Well, no, there I don’t say you are wrong, and a strange alliance I always thought it, for there has never been any love lost between Lancaster and the Mowbrays. You can’t explain these things! I’ve seen it happen oft and lome: one family will just naturally mislike another, and if they were all holy saints it wouldn’t make any difference, for no force but that one of them would chew his meat in a fashion that gave offence to another, or some such witless thing! But as for these thoughts of yours about the King, my dear, put them from your head! Why, there’s no one stands higher in his grace than Monseigneur, and would he do his son scathe, think you?’

‘Richard,’ said Mary, ‘never forgets, and he never forgives. He waits.’

Dame Katherine reflected that Mary must have been thinking of the way in which Richard had brought down the Lords Appellant four years ago. It was true that Richard had waited: rather surprisingly, for he was a man of impetuous temper. But he had been younger then and the poor boy had had a fright. Dame Katherine knew what perhaps Mary had never been told, that his uncle Gloucester had threatened him with the death of Edward II. No wonder he had stayed quiet for the whole year! The only wonder was that he had dared to raise his head again. But he had dared, choosing his moment. Dame Katherine, about to pop another dragé into her mouth, put it back in the bowl. Mary was rousing discomfortable thoughts. She said uneasily: ‘Well, he is a strange man, but there is always the Queen, and she is one for peace, give her her due!’

‘I have heard Monseigneur say that the Queen is too easy, will not do what she might.’

‘Oh, now, that is not just! I daresay she has her troubles, like the rest of us, and does as she may!’

‘He is asotted of her,’ said Mary.

That was true, and oddly true, thought Dame Katherine, for you would be hard put to it to find a plainer woman. Such a shock as it had given them all when they had first clapped eyes on her! She was a German, sister of the Emperor Wenzel, and of Sigismund, King of Hungary, and platter-faced, like so many of her race. She did what she could to distract attention from her lack of beauty, but neither the dimensions nor the magnificence of the coifs she had made so fashionable had deceived critical eyes. Everybody had expected the young King to turn from her in disgust, but he had seemed to love her from the start. Dame Katherine was heartened by this reflection, and said: ‘Yes, so he is, and so you may be easy! She may not steer him always as she should – well, good soul, she has no more notion of strait-keeping than he! – but she is not one to bosom up malice. Mark me if she does not lead the King to her own kind way!’

She saw that Mary was pensive still, and leaned forward to pat her hand. ‘You have been husbandless overlong: there is nothing makes a lass so mumpish!’ she said, in her warm voice. ‘All this roiling about the world! If I have said once I have said a dozen times that a married man would do better to mind his affairs at home. Let your lord leave crusading to greenheads like my son John, and you will soon be amended of your cares, my lady! There, then, he will not keep you waiting long, please God!’

Two

Beau Chevalier

1

He did not keep them waiting long. Before the household had settled down after M. de Guyenne’s visit, it was known that my lord Derby had reached Calais. Ships were being chartered for his passage; he had applied for a licence to bring certain foreign goods through the Customs; and Derby Herald had ridden to Kenilworth with letters for my lady.

The children were wild with excitement, their chief concern being to discover what Father was bringing home from his travels. Only Harry and Thomas were of an age to remember it, but even Humfrey knew that Father had brought them a bear from Pruce, when he had gone there to fight for the Teutonic Knights. It had found its way into Cousin Richard’s collection of wild beasts in the Tower, but it was still their very own bear: Cousin Richard said so. They tried to find out from Derby Herald what Father had for them this time, but he would only grin, which made them certain that it was something of more than ordinary splendour. Then they forgot about this in the bustle of removing from Kenilworth to London. Father owned a great inn, called Cold Harbour, in Dowgate. It was part of Mother’s inheritance, a stately stone mansion of many storeys and countless rooms, occupying all the ground between All Hallows Lane and Hay Wharf Lane. It had been built by a rich merchant, and sold by him to the Earl of Hereford for the payment of a rose at midsummer. It was situated on Upper Thames Street, but it was set back from the street, behind the Church of All Hallows the Less, under whose steeple and choir its arched gateway was curiously placed. It could be reached as easily, however, by water, for its gardens and tenements ran down to the river to a private strand. It was one of the largest of the London inns, and so secluded that it was possible to sojourn there even in July, when the heat made much of the city noisome, and the dread of pestilence haunted the minds of anxious parents.

For a little while the lordings found enough to interest them on the river. Despising the spaceful inner court, with its lawns and flowers, they made the quay their favourite playground. Here, within flight-shot of the Steelyard, with its high, embattled walls enclosing the Hanse merchants, they would watch the tilt-boats drifting past, and learn to recognise the galleys of Gascony and Genoa, the woad-ships from Picardy, the Flanders scuts, the common whelk-boats from Essex, and the laden lighters coming down river from Oxford, all putting in to Billingsgate and Queenhythe. Once they saw, jump-eyed, the Lord Mayor’s gilded barge making its stately way towards Westminster; but although they could obtain a distant view of London Bridge they were not close enough to see the traitors’ blackened heads that embellished it, or to watch the barges and the wherries shooting the arches – not always, as their valet delightfully informed them, without dire mishap. They soon became clamorous to be taken to see these sights, and many more besides.

Across the river, east of the orchards and the meadows on the Surrey bank, a huddle of buildings with spires and towers rising amongst them had been pointed out to the lordings by a well-meaning but daffish servitor. That, he said, was Southwark, little recking what visions he conjured up in their minds. At Southwark, they knew, could be seen the Tabard Inn, familiar to them from Master Chaucer’s tales, the Clink, an awesome prison, where such men as babbled and frayed on the streets were clapped up; and the Marshalsea, a high court where matters of chivalry were decided by the Lord High Constable, and the Lord High Steward. Who, demanded the lordings of their harassed attendants, had a better right than they to visit these places? Was not Bel sire the Lord High Steward, and had they not heard Master Chaucer’s tales from his very own lips? The nurses, and Father Joseph, thinking of the naughty stews, of which the lordings were as yet unaware, said repressively that Southwark was no fit place for nobly born imps, not foreseeing the time when the lordings would be known and welcome guests at every tavern on the south bank. But Southwark was only a part of what the lordings wished to see. They wanted to visit the ruins of Bel sire’s old palace of the Savoy, burned before their time by an angry mob; they wanted to see the Great Conduit in West Cheap, with the bakers’ carts from Stratford gathered round it; the Tun, in Cornhill, where night-walkers were imprisoned; the menagerie at the Tower; the great ships in the wharves east of the bridge; the horse-fair at Smithfield, without the walls; and all the teeming life in the narrow streets, where, between the limewashed houses, sleds were drawn noisily over the cobbles, and one might see guildsmen in their liveries, apprentices ripe for mischief, a jack-raker, a water-bearer, trundling his tankard along on wheels, a town-crier: all humdrum sights to town-bred persons, but to the lordings invested with the magic of novelry.

But Mother feared that one whiff of the air blown from the meaner streets would infect them with sickness; they were not allowed to go beyond the wall of the inn; and the gatekeeper was a pebblehearted person who refused to open the gates as much as a crack to let them peep at the busy world. They had hoped that at the least they would be taken to High Mass in St Paul’s Cathedral, for Father Joseph had told them that there was a clock there, with an angel whose arms pointed to the hours. Not even this was permitted; they attended Mass in their own chapel, for although it was now forbidden to the citizens to cast household refuse on to middens at their gates, and pigs no longer rootled in the kennels, Mother suspected that in the poorer parts of the town these abuses still continued, just as she suspected that the rules for the clean disposal in the markets of offal were too often broken. The nurses, with the exception of Johanna Waring, were as disappointed as their charges; but Johanna had no opinion of London, and said that it was bad enough to bring the sely children into a city where the bells made more din than the masons at Kenilworth, so that they would all become diswitted, without exposing their precious persons to the evil infections that were well known to lurk in crowded streets.

The sely children, of course, showed no signs of becoming diswitted: it was Johanna’s head which ached. The bells rang all day, and (Johanna said) all night too, for not only was the Gabriel bell rung at dawn in every church, but bells rang earlier still for the morrow-mass. After that they rang incessantly until the hour of Prime from all the larger churches, where Masses were said at short intervals. Warning bells, sacring bells, passing bells, bells controlling the markets, and handbells sounded in a confused jangle until curfew bell was rung from four churches within the walls. The city grew quieter then, for after curfew only persons of good repute might walk abroad. Many, of course, who were of extremely bad repute did walk abroad, and several times Johanna was awakened by the hubbub of a hue and cry. The only thing that roused the sely children was a fire, which broke out close to Cold Harbour one night. The bells rang in every neighbouring church, the beadle’s horn blared, and shouts and screams, and the crash of falling timbers, as men pulled down the blazing walls with iron hooks, rendered the night hideous. It was enough, Johanna said, to make the sely children forstraught. In fact, their enjoyment of the episode was only marred by the refusal of their attendants to allow them to run out to see all the excitement. They knew that during the summer months every household was compelled by law to set a leathern bucket of water outside its gates at curfew-time, and nothing would convince them that they were not old enough to form links in the chain of men handing these from the river to the doomed house. ‘We might as well have stayed at Kenilworth!’ said Thomas, furious at their prohibition.

Then that grievance was forgotten with all the others, because Father was with them at last; and the inn throbbed with as much life as could be found without its walls. As soon as he came home there was movement in the house, and sudden laughter; the comings and goings of strangers; clatter of unknown voices; the ring of hooves in the outer court; and the echo of minstrelsy creeping through an unshuttered window to drift into the children’s dreams.

They had thought they had been able all the time to picture him clearly, but when he stood before them they knew that they had forgotten much that came flooding back to their memories: the upward jerk of his chin when he laughed; the quick turn of his head; the russet lights in his hair; the arrested smile in eyes as bright as Harry’s; and the searching gleam that flashed for an instant and then was gone, like a blade half-drawn from its sheath.

He was of no more than middle height, but so well-made that it was easy to see why he was the most famous jouster of his day. His movements were decisive; and for all his look of strength he was rarely ungraceful, and never, even when arrayed in his harness, clumsy.

The Londoners loved him as they had never loved his haughty father. No angry mob would ever burn Henry of Bolingbroke’s house to the ground. When he rode into the lists at Smithfield the apprentices stamped and cheered their approval, and sober citizens did not disdain to join in the roar of applause that burst forth when he unhorsed his adversary, neatly, as only the best jousters could, the blunted point of his lance striking his rival on the helm, and tumbling him out of the saddle. The Londoners knew all his tricks, and they used to wait for them, and nudge one another when they saw him take his lance and balance it for a moment in his hand, like a jongleur, before setting it in the rest, and grasping it with the cuddling gesture that never failed to delight them. That was the kind of lord they liked: a handsome, jolly knight, richly caparisoned, splendidly horsed, riding forth with a noble meiny at his back, but not so high that he had not a wave of his cap for a cheering crowd, a jesting word to toss to a maid hanging out of an upper window, and a ‘God thank you!’ for a common fellow who ran to pick up the glove he had dropped.

2

He was brought to the gates of his inn by a rout of apprentices who ran beside his horse, shouting ‘Noël’ to him. ‘I thank you, I thank you!’ he called, jostling a way through them. ‘But let me pass, good friends, a’God’s half !’

He had sent one of his squires forward from Southwark, and the youth had arrived just long enough before him to give the Countess time to reach the outer court, her children gathered about her, before his company clattered into it. He sprang from his saddle, caught her up in his arms, and held her, and kissed her, laughing at her protests, saying in his quick way: ‘Who has a better right, madam? Tell me, then!’

But when he had kissed her again he set her down, and turned to his children. They were shy, but he was delighted with them, exclaiming: ‘By the faith of my body, ma mie, we have done well by each other, you and I! This young squire my Harry? This Thomas? And is this great creature little John?’

They were all three kneeling, but he had them on their feet in an instant. It was he who knelt, so that he was on a level with them, the better to scan their faces, holding John within his arm, stretching out his hand for Harry and Thomas to kiss, asking if they had forgotten him, and if they had been tendable to Mother while he had been away. Then there was Humfrey to be greeted, and Blanche to be admired, and he was calling out to one of his company: ‘Will you match me this brood of mine, Hugh?’

Then, embracing them all in his bright, smiling glance, he said: ‘What do you think I have brought you, my sons? Well? Well?’

‘Oh, what, sir?’ cried Thomas.

But he would not tell them; he would only say things like, ‘A birch-rod,’ which made them dance with impatience; and he swept Mother into the house while they were still pelting him with questions.

They had been right in guessing that he had brought them something of more than ordinary splendour: he had brought them a leopard and a tame Turk. The Turk was rather too tame for their tastes, but the leopard was all that could have been desired. Father had chartered a special ship for its voyage; and for a week it was housed in the garden, pacing up and down behind the bars of its cage, and snarling in fiendly wise. For a week Mother endured sleepless nights; for a week the nurses prophesied disaster; and then Thomas, to his lasting shame, woke in the small hours yelling that the leopard was eating him up; and the leopard, like the bear, went to the menagerie in the Tower.

Hardly had Father’s bales of baggage been untrussed than he went to visit the King, as his duty was. Cousin Richard was summering at Sheen, and Father took Harry with him, so that the other lordings heard all about it. Sheen was the Queen’s favourite palace. It was built beside the river, in a great garden, and it was so crammed with treasures that Harry could not remember the half of them to describe to his brothers. The King was always spending fortunes on the adornment of his person or his palaces. One of the first things he did, on the arrival of his cousin of Derby, was to take him to see a set of hallings, executed by Michel Bernard, and sent over from Arras. Father admired them much, which pleased the King. In fact, nothing could have gone off better than this visit. The King was at his most gracious. He made Father tell of his adventures, while he lounged on a carved seat under an elm tree, and ate cherries out of a gilded bowl. He wore a short pourpoint, one half of it pink and the other white, the trailing sleeves being lined with bawdekin, which shimmered in the sunlight. His hose were white, too; and the toes of his shoes curled upwards in stiff points. His eyes were so blue, and his scented curls so fair, that Harry thought that the princes in Johanna’s fables must have looked just like him. Cousin Richard made Harry sit at his feet, and from time to time he dangled a cherry above him, dropping it as soon as Harry opened his mouth.

He was not much interested in Father’s sleeveless errand to Pruce. He said: ‘And so you disbanded your followers, and went to visit the Holy Sepulchre! How you do troll about the world, fair cousin! Did they make you good cheer in Venice?’